MUSIC SCENE: Well-travelled Rorey Carroll makes area debut

Rorey Carroll's style moves between folk, country and rock, and fits neatly into the wide parameters of Americana.

By Jay N. Miller/For The Patriot Ledger

Songwriters, whether their style be rock ’n’ roll, folk or blues, tend to like to write about characters on the edge, unusual and dramatic situations, and often times adventures and misadventures.

But few songwriters anywhere can bring the personal experience Rorey Carroll can, as her background itself sounds like a picaresque tale. That’s just one reason her music is so striking and indelible, and she’ll be bringing it through the area this week, as she opens iconoclast songsmith Todd Snider’s national tour.

Carroll will be opening for Snider at Brighton Music Hall on Monday night, and then on Tuesday night at The Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River. Carroll’s latest album “Love Is An Outlaw” has been out a couple months on Lo Hi Records, and early reviews have been glowing. A review in the Huffington Post, for example, compared Carroll’s songwriting to John Prine, and Snider himself.

Carroll grew up in the Chicago area, but had trouble finding herself after high school, and spent some time living out of her car. Eventually her wanderlust got the best of her and she was hopping freight trains around the country, and among other things, hiking the Appalachian Trail. At the same time she was honing her fascination with music, busking in the streets to make money to survive, until she found a lucrative and seemingly more secure occupation.

Conveying marijuana for a group of growers, Carroll was ultimately busted with 27 pounds of pot in her car, earning her a felony in Arkansas in 2011. Clearly needing a new direction, she moved to East Nashville, and devoted herself to music. Snider heard her perform and became a mentor to the young singer, whose style moves between folk, country and rock, much as his does – both fit neatly into the wide parameters of Americana.

Some of the more striking imagery in Carroll’s writing is evident in the title cut from the new album, as well as “1:42 Night Train,” and the haunting “Not Just Good Enough.” But there are all sorts of lyrical highlights sprinkled through the tunes, and repeated listening seems to uncover more and more.

We chatted with Carroll by phone from her Nashville home, just before the current 20-date national tour kicked off.

“I only did poetry as a kid,” said Carroll, “never songwriting. I had no formal training in music, and I just learned the three basic chords you needed to make a song. A friend found out I could sing, and taught me some chords, and that got me started. I started writing music immediately then, when I was about 19.”

The well-traveled Carroll has never performed in New England before this swing.

“I got on a train once that went up to the Northeast, but I never made it to New England, except when I started hiking the Appalachian Trail, up in Maine,” Carroll explained. “The trains were mainly a summer thing, one summer. I had been living in my car in Asheville, North Carolina. Some friends talked me into going with them, on a Greyhound to Chicago, and I ended up traveling that whole summer.

“Hopping trains is different than how the American people picture it, with Woody Guthrie playing songs and everybody singing along,” Carroll noted. “These days, it’s just not like that, and today your basic hobos are felons and outcasts. I always felt that was the hardest way I ever traveled. You’re always thinking you could be arrested, or kicked off the trains by the cops. Once you are actually able to get on a train, it is one of the most freeing feelings you can ever have, but most of it is hiding, and sneaking around to avoid cops and railroad security. The culture is not what they say it is, and while I did it, I wouldn’t recommend it.”

A stunning personal event had also contributed to Carroll’s coming off her road journeys.

“My brother passed away, and it was a huge blow,” she said. “That’s when I had to take some time and decide what I really wanted to do, and re-assessed my life. I spent five or six years playing open mikes and so on, trying to be a professional musician, or at least find a way to do it so that I could support myself.

“But, the easy way is just not in my vocabulary,” Carroll said with a rueful laugh. “I feel like my natural state of being is as a rover. Todd gives me homework, and one assignment was to write about my Arkansas experience. It is funny now, but the line in the song I wrote is literally, ‘I decided to clean up my life, and make a living selling pot.’ I heard about some people in California, and they had openings for drivers, to transport their pot. I didn’t want to end up living in my car any more, and it was a way to make good money. Then I got busted, with 27 pounds in my car. After that I decided I really wanted to focus on music, period.”

Luckily for Carroll, the judicial system didn’t come down too hard on her.

“I was very, very lucky that I got a second chance,” she said.

Meeting Snider was kind of a coincidence, but a fine byproduct of living in East Nashville.

“The first time I ever heard Todd Snider was on my way to Utah for my first festival gig,” said Carroll. “We had borrowed my friend’s car, and three of us songwriters were driving to Utah, and the only CD she had was Todd’s. We listened to that the whole way, and when we got back home I went out and bought all his albums. I love his writing. But I love a lot of different songwriters too, like Feist, John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, Stevie Nicks, and all the greats.

“Growing up in Chicago, most of what I heard was hip-hop,” Carroll pointed out, “and that had a lot of influence on the way I write, which is, I guess, in a Lou Reed-kind of rambling way. It was always my favorite thing as a kid to go to hip-hop shows with smart lyrical content. I never was exposed to country music growing up, which makes it funny that I live in Nashville now. But I have grown to love stuff like Merle Haggard, Townes Van Zandt, and the Eagles.”

Carroll performs as part of a trio in her own headlining shows, with Matt Rowland and Herschel Van Dyke, but this tour finds both Snider and her performing solo. Snider’s latest album, “East Side Bulldog,” is just out, and it is a vivid blast of kinetic energy, reviving a sort of 1960s garage-band, boogie-woogie rock that is hard to resist. (Snider also came through Boston in May with his side project, the band Hard Working Americans.)

“Having both Todd and I play solo makes it so much easier to tour,” noted Carroll. “But I love leading my own band too, and Matt and Herschel are both jazz cats, so it makes for some interesting music. Matt is also my boyfriend, and while we both also perform with other people, our goal is to spend more time on the road together.”

With two fine songwriters playing solo, the emphasis on this tour is surely on the lyrics to their music, and Carroll feels like a solo tour with Snider is both enjoyable and instructive.

“On a tour like this the focus is certainly on the songwriting,” said Carroll, “and it is so cool to know that we can do that. I think it is amazing to see Todd’s audience, and how he has sculpted them, almost trained them to listen to him. Even the loudest, craziest people in the crowd learn to quiet down for Todd. He’ll set them up, talk to them, and make them quiet down and meet him where he wants to go with a song, and it is really something to see.”

NOTABLE SHOWS: We also want to take a moment to cite two big shows for good causes coming up. Sunday night Berklee Performance Center hosts a benefit concert for refugee relief, topped by Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle, and several more luminaries of roots music. Wednesday is the latest celebration of Daniel Pearl Day, dedicated to the memory of the Wall Street Journal reporter who was captured and killed by terrorists. Pearl was a music fan, and an accomplished fiddler, and every year since then musicians come together to celebrate his memory and raise money for peaceful purposes: The Lizard lounge is Cambridge hosts this year’s event, and South Shore residents Susan Cattaneo and Jim Gambino are part of the stellar all-star crew performing.